Since the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas occurred on May 24th, many people in the media have tried to make sense of the seemingly senseless. The same question comes up every time, “Why would an 18-year-old boy storm an elementary school and kill two innocent teachers and nineteen children in cold blood?
Accordingly, the same answer is parroted in almost a cut and paste fashion. The Washington Post’s take on this tragedy is Salvador Ramos was the real victim. In their article on the shooting the Post offered this explanation, “The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said.”
The typical leftist outcry on this tragedy was to call for more gun control, not about the families who are grieving the real victims. Because the left is so comfortable with death (abortion, euthanasia, crime) a human life is nothing more than a means to an end. If people have to die for gun control, well its a price well paid to foster the ideology.
Political opportunist, Beto O’Rouke, created an ugly scene at a press conference about the shooting with Texas Governor Greg Abbot. His insensitivity to the victims and their families to score a few political points was absolutely nauseating. House democrats hope to pass legislation on gun control soon, and even senile Joe Biden called for a ban on assault weapons. In the days that followed the shooting, every democrat politician and media sycophant dutifully shouted in unison a highly emotional plea to ban what they claim are “weapons of war”– the 2nd Amendment be damned. But these misguided, highly emotional and manipulative operatives inevitably fail to realize that guns don’t kill, people do.
Matt Walsh , a conservative talk show host on the Daly Wire, had this to say on his Twitter feed regarding the Uvalde school shooting:
“Start with a boy. Take away his father. Sit him in front of a screen all day. Feed him porn. Feed him an endless stream of content. Give him no moral formation. No guidance. No companionship. Give him drugs. Isolate him. That’s how you make a school shooter. Rinse and repeat.
Our culture is a factory just churning out lost, disturbed, broken, nihilistic people. They don’t all become [a] school shooter but few of them amount to anything good.”
Time to Ask the question as to whether school shootings are suicides?
Of all three explanations for this horrendous event, Walsh’s seems to be the most logical and grounded in truth. In fact, GMC would argue that there is an epidemic of teen mental health issues and this shooting and others are just another way for a troubled teen to commit suicide, either literally (ending one’s own life before being apprehended or being killed during a shoot-out ) or figuratively (being locked in prison for the rest of your life if you are taken alive). In many cases the shooter leaves behind some kind of suicide-like note on social media or a manifesto which serves to explain the reasons for his actions. Typically suicide notes also serve to increase the pain of survivors who must deal with the aftermath.
In 2019, PBS published a story that teen suicide had reached an all-time high and was steadily on the rise since the year 2000. The article stated that, “In 2017, there were 47 percent more suicides among people aged 15 to 19 than in the year 2000.” The CDC released a report in 2020 based on a study they conducted. The conclusion: “Between 2007 and 2018, the national suicide rate among persons aged 10–24 increased 57.4%.” According to CNN the isolation of the pandemic had also driven the teen suicide rates in five states.
Healthychildren.org sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatricians is also sounding the alarm, “According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 1 in 3 of all adolescents ages 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder. These numbers have been rising steadily; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20%. These stats combined with the rate of hospital admissions for suicidal teenagers also doubling over the past decade leaves us with many concerning questions.”
Ironically and incredibly tone deaf, this same American Academy of Pediatricians wondering about the possible causes of teen anxiety and suicide, also fully supports the mental confusion, medical castration and gender mutilating surgeries of the transgender movement. No wonder the kids are anxious and hopeless. The adults in their lives have failed them.
Some of these adults have abdicated their basic parental duties relying on grandparents or the state to raise their child, as was the case with the Uvalde shooter. Too many doctors, educators, and parents, in an attempt to be inclusive and accepting at all costs, are not telling young people the truth (one’s biological sex is immutable) and thereby providing a highly unstable environment which is not based in any semblance of reality. These same adults had the benefit of growing up in a somewhat saner, safer Judeo-Christian society with some guardrails of morality still intact. They have robbed the current generation of children of goodness and truth during a critical time in their human psychological and physical development. By so doing they have exacerbated the epidemic of youth mental health issues.
This anything goes, nihilistic world we live in devoid of any religious grounding or meaning has produced a group of despondent young people who feel that the nothingness of death is preferable to living a life – albeit with a few challenges and struggles. Teens are falsely told that they can do anything they want, whenever they want. So why aren’t they happy?
Because these kids soon realize that they have nothing and no one to live for, no connection with a higher power, no reason for being. The school shootings are simply a symptom of the self-hatred and self-loathing that young people feel who are estranged from the Almighty and in a peculiar way either a cry for help or possibly retribution for a childhood devoid of true love, truth and goodness.
We must pray for families that they can withstand the assaults of our demonic culture and that our children will once again live in innocence, faith and hope.